Digital Scout sees score in high school sports stats

Former television sports reporter Dan Fronczak recalls his frustration when he couldn’t provide up-to-the-minute information to fans wanting to know how their favorite high school teams were faring.

Now a vice president with the Digital Scout division of Digital School Network in Columbus, Fronczak is more content as the company prepares to launch a service that provides real-time statistics and play-by-play scoring through laptop computers, tablets or mobile devices.

“This is what I dreamed about for years – the ability to display information like this,” he said. “People are clamoring for it.”

HS Game Center will debut this month in five cities, including Columbus, and start with 150 high schools through a partnership between Digital Scout and Time Warner Cable Inc. In addition, Digital Scout is getting ready to provide the data through Game Center pages on the websites of 75 schools in Ohio.

Its aim is to provide high school sports fans with the same sort of real-time game data offered by professional leagues and college teams, said Nathan Heerdt, Digital School Network’s chief operating officer.

“If we can do that,” he said, “it’s a game-changer for us. It’s really different than anything we’ve done here.”

Local markets

Digital Scout has been providing statistical and scouting software to coaches since it was founded in 1995. Columbus businessman Al Vrable, one of the company’s early investors, has been its majority owner since 2005.

Vrable, who owns six nursing homes in Ohio, hired Heerdt last February to help grow Digital School Network. Besides Digital Scout, the business includes SchoolPointe, which develops and maintains content for school district websites. The company has grown to 20 workers from six employees when Heerdt was hired last February. Vrable called Heerdt and Fronczak a “pretty good tag team.”

“In the last 10 months,” Vrable said, “the company has really started to explode. ... It’s the rebirth of an old company and a transition to a new one.”

Heerdt has been involved in tech start-ups since 1998, including Jobboards.com, an online job search company he founded in Columbus and later sold. Digital School Network was attractive, he said, because it combines his passions – sports and Internet technology.

“I saw it has a lot of potential and was ready to grow,” Heerdt said. “It just needed a swift kick and jump-start.”

One of his early steps was to see if Fronczak, whom he had known since their high school days in the Cleveland area, was interested in leaving as a sports anchor at TV station WBNS to work on the Digital Scout product. Fronczak joined the company in August, and the two quickly decided to make development of live statistics a priority.

Time Warner got involved because it sees Game Center as an extension of the high school sports coverage it provides to help retain customers, said Jason Pheister, the cable company’s vice president for local sports programming. The effort includes televising several hundred events a year and an on-demand feature that provides reruns of games.

“The whole premise,” Pheister said, “is to make our cable company a local entity that reaches out to hometowns and covers these games. Game Center is a natural progression of that.”

Pheister said he was impressed with interest shown by fans in Game Center when Digital Scout and Time Warner tested it during the California high school football championships in December. It received thousands of requests per minute for scoring and stats, even though the companies had done no advertising.

“It’s amazing,” Pheister said. “(Game Center) is really beyond anything out there for high school sports.”

Game changer

Time Warner and Digital Scout have an agreement in principle to roll out Game Center this year for football and boys basketball games in Columbus, Cincinnati, Albany, N.Y., metropolitan Kansas City and Austin, Texas. Pheister said decisions to offer it elsewhere will ride on how well Game Center does in those cities. Other sports may be added as well.

Fronczak said the sort of licensing agreement Digital Scout is working out with Time Warner is changing the way Digital Scout receives its revenue. It has traditionally charged schools about $150 per sport for its hand-held software that compiles stats for eight sports.

More than 11,000 high schools, 900 college customers and 200 international clients use Digital Scout for at least one of the sports.

But Fronczak and Heerdt said they decided that licensing the data to media companies, including Time Warner, would provide a better revenue stream. The company is making the transition to that approach, which allows schools to receive Digital Scout software for free.

“We decided licensing this data would be more profitable and more beneficial for the company as a whole,” Fronczak said.